There are two main policies to increase the welfare of the society, as Prof. Lessig pointed me out a while ago. This idea itself is not new at all. It is more one of the tools to analyze each issues. So, here are, for the sake of my memory, the summary of these two strategies.
4 main areas in which you can expand copyright protection.
1) expand the scope of rights holders
2) expand the scope of the rights each rights holders have
3) stronger enforcement and changing judicial procedure in favor of rights holders
4) technological protection and legal support to such technologies
good things
･enable copyright holders to recoup the cost of creation
・
bad things
・raise number of
2 main ways.
1) narrow down the scope of protection (1 and 2 above)
2) lower the transaction cost imposed by copyright and the society
good things
bad things
the scope of the copyright is, in nature, contradictory. The more rights on the side of the holders, the less freedom on the side of the users. The major regulator is obviously the law.
The way the technological measures are implemented is also contradictory. you can have only one usage rules for one license (of course, you can offer different kinds of licneses for the same work). And the concrete usage rules is basically decided by the copyright holders. So, it is more about the question of mind set. Or, maybe it is about the question of transaction cost (because they sometime don't have the power to set the usage rules by themselves, unless all the rest of the stake holders agree to do so). It is like everyone has a veto for doing one thing. This is becuase the default is prohibition under the current law, and considered the process of dicision making, this is really a tough rule.
Is the rest also contradictory?
Of course, the smaller the scope, the less transaction cost imposed by law. But transaction cost can be significantly lowered by licensing and efficient distribution mechanisms with rights clearing.
And how to think about enforcement under the loose copyright policy?
How to motivate people from employing looser usage rules of technologies? It is not necessarily supported by copyright. It is more supported by the mindset or social norms of people, isn't it?